Here, in a newly revised edition, is a powerful and pertinent guide for congregations wanting to move away from 'maintenance thinking' to powerful, creative engagement with the world. Visionary yet practical, Nessan's influential book makes a persuasive case for the centrality of mission in the life of the church. Nessan's model of mission-driven leadership is strongly centered on the community of faith's worship and draws unique connections between the worship life of a congregation and every aspect of the church's ministry. Around the twin foci of congregational identity and mission, the chapters in this dynamic book provide solid theological and radical direction on the themes of worship, education, fellowship, stewardship, evangelism, global connections, and social ministry. Equally pertinent to seminary classroom and parish life, the new edition highlights worship's centrality, adds a new chapter on prayer and spiritual practices in this framework, significantly revises the treatments of fellowship and evangelism, and adds a full set of materials designed for congregational visioning and planning.

For contemporary Western readers, it can be easy to miss or misread cultural nuances in the New Testament. To hear the text correctly we must be attuned to its original context. As David deSilva demonstrates, keys to interpretation are found in paying attention to four essential cultural themes: honor and shame, patronage and reciprocity, kinship and family, and purity and pollution. Through our understanding of honor and shame in the Mediterranean world, we gain new appreciation for how early Christians sustained commitment to a distinctive Christian identity and practice. By examining the protocols of patronage and reciprocity, we grasp more firmly the connections between God's grace and our response. In exploring kinship and household relations, we grasp more fully the ethos of the early Christian communities as a new family brought together by God. And by investigating the notions of purity and pollution along with their associated practices, we realize how the ancient map of society and the world was revised by the power of the gospel. This new edition is thoroughly revised and expanded with up-to-date scholarship. A milestone work in the study of New Testament cultural backgrounds, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity offers a deeper appreciation of the New Testament, the gospel, and Christian discipleship.

The America we know and love is in danger as never before in its history. The Land of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the uniquely great American Constitution is under deadly attack. It has already been distorted and heavily damaged. America is being assaulted from within and without by forces of atheism, legalized immorality, socialism, communism, and Islam. Some of these forces go by the deceptive names of "progressives," "social democrats," "leftists," as well as socialism, communism, and atheism, but they have their basis in vile hatred of America, and they work assiduously to malign and defame our country, and overthrow it. Their method is constant lying and deception in every form imaginable. We witness preposterous lies every day from these individuals and groups in their quest to defame America, conservatism, Republicans, and any individual or group that opposes them. They have as their goal the revolutionary overthrow of America, and its replacement by socialism, communism, or Islam and Sharia law. All of these forces have a long historical record of inhuman cruelty, genocide, and democide. The destructive revolutionary activities of the 1960s opened up these avenues of attack, and they have increasingly evolved and been institutionalized since the 1970s and 80s. They run throughout our educational institutions, the courts, the media, entertainment, and have even infiltrated our government. Our universities have been corrupted and politicized by them. Many professors who teach our young people today are avowed Marxists, socialists, and communists. Many of these professors are also radical feminists who are atheists, Marxists, communists, and lesbians. They also express great hatred for America, and seek to radically change it to some form of Marxism, socialism, or communism. The ACLU, an atheist and communist organization from its start in 1920, is now a highly financed organization that actually seeks to legally overthrow Constitutional American liberties, and promote a totally different world of anarchic, atheistic freedom, divorced from God and moral law, and which will be intolerant of anything else. America began as a Christian democratic nation, with Presidents who stood staunchly for liberty under God, Christianity, the Bible, and freedom of worship. They warned us against the results of immorality-tyranny, despotism, corruption, and decline. Constitutional liberties have already been largely swept away by a Supreme Court that now places atheistic autonomy above everything else-above God, the Bible, morality, our country, our flag, marriage, and the family. The current President has even declared that we are no longer a Christian nation. This book not only seeks to describe these corrupting developments, but to suggest how and why they have risen to dominance.

Here is Friedrich Nietzsche's great masterpiece The Anti-Christ, wherein Nietzsche attacks Christianity as a blight on humanity. This classic is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Nietzsche and his place within the history of philosophy. "We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts-the strong man as the typical reprobate, the 'outcast among men.' Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity " -Friedrich Nietzsche

Uniquely in the kingdoms of western Christendom, the Scottish bishops obtained authority, in 1225, to hold inter-diocesan meetings without a supervisory archbishop, and continued to meet in this way for nearly 250 years. Donald Watt provides an authoritative study of these church councils from the Latin and English records based on original sources.In addition to creating an original work of considerable historical interest, Professor Watt brings discussion of the councils and their significance into the broader context of Scotland's political, legal, ecclesiastical and social situation over a long period.An important contribution to Scottish church history and to its influence on contemporary affairs.

The 1960s were a time of explosive religious change. In the Christian churches, it was a time of innovation, from the "new theology" and "new morality" of Bishop Robinson to the evangelicalism of the Charismatic Movement, and of charismatic leaders such as Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King. But it was also a time of rapid social and cultural change when Christianity faced challenges from Eastern religions, from Marxism and feminism, and above all from new "affluent" lifestyles. Hugh McLeod tells in detail, using oral history, how these movements and conflicts were experienced in England, but because the Sixties were an international phenomenon, he looks at other countries as well, especially the U.S. and France. McLeod explains what happened to religion in the 1960s, why it happened, and how the events of that decade shaped the rest of the 20th century.